Tag: Strategic Plan

SDI hosted its Annual Board Meeting and Secretariat sessions

SDI Board and Secretariat hosted a collection of meetings from 19-23 April 2022 at the SDI Secretariat in Cape Town.  

In attendance, SDI hosted its Board of Directors, which is chaired by Joseph Muturi, national leader of Muungano wa Wanavijiji, the Kenyan Slum Dweller Federation. The majority of Board members are slum dweller leaders, augmented by SDI-affiliated and independent professionals with expertise in key priority areas. 

Get to know our Board of Directors here. 

The introductory sessions spanned two days and served as an opportunity for the Board and Secretariat to reflect on SDI’s 2018-2022 Strategic Plan, the State of SDI today, how we got here, and our key priority areas moving forward. 

The sessions took a reflective and introspective look at the management of SDI’s Secretariat from 2018 to date and the tremendous progress made since the 2019 systems audit by Sida, one of SDI’s funding partners, highlighted major shortcomings in our internal controls and governance practices. As outlined previously, SDI immediately identified and took a number of critical actions and has spent the subsequent two years engaging in a process of comprehensive organisational turnaround to reactivate, rebuild and strengthen SDI’s Secretariat and governance structures. This week of meetings marked a critical juncture in this process as the first in-person meeting of the newly established SDI Board of Directors and the first meeting between the new board and its Secretariat. 

SDI’s Programmatic Work

The Board and Secretariat also reflected on the network’s programmatic work over the past two years and the Secretariat’s role in supporting affiliates in this regard. SDI affiliates presented impressive work on climate adaptation and resilience, Covid-19 recovery and response, youth inclusion, human settlements and slum upgrading. Additionally, the Secretariat presented a number of key pieces of work, including a comprehensive Communications Strategy, the development of a Youth Inclusion Framework and activities in a variety of global spaces including the Gobeshona Conference on Locally Led Adaptations (27 March – 1 April), COP26, and more. 

Additional pieces of work presented during the week include efforts towards the development of a comprehensive Business Development Strategy prioritising the hiring of a business development manager, rebuilding funder relationships and diversifying the funder base, and plans for a participatory review of our 2018-22 Strategic Plan and development of a strategy for the 2023-27 period. We aim to conclude the review by the start of the fourth quarter of 2022, with the new plan adopted by the Board and Council in the first quarter of 2023. 

The week concluded with a Donor and Partners Meeting where SDI’s institutional strengthening and programmatic work over the past year was presented to our donors and partners by SDI Board members, Secretariat staff, and federation leaders. While most of the donors, partners and affiliates joined the meeting virtually, it still provided a critical opportunity for the SDI network and many of its key supporters to gather together to review the work done to date and chart a way forward to future support. This offered a critical moment for SDI in our efforts to continue building the trust of our donors and partners.   

To request more information of the minutes of these meetings, please email Cher@sdinet.org 

Sharper Learning Focus: A Culture of Learning By and for the Poor

The end of 2017 marked the end of a four-year strategic planning period for SDI and the close-out of various projects and contracts in support of implementation of that plan. To report on the successes, challenges, and impact of our work over that time, SDI produced a Basket Fund Close Out report, available in full here. In this series of blog posts, we present excerpts from this report that highlight some of the key learnings and impact of our work over the past four years and point towards areas for continued growth in the new Strategic Plan, launched this year.

The first outcome towards which the SDI network was working over the course of the last Strategic Plan was: SDI affiliated federations apply tools for learning and knowledge with sharper focus and rigour.

Throughout the 2013-2018 period, the city learning centers (identified at the outset of the last Strategic Plan) in Kampala, Accra, Cape Town, and Mumbai played a central role in the development of city-wide organizing and partnerships throughout the network. Targeted exchange programs to and from these centers for both community members and their government partners have been central to this effort.

In the Kampala learning center, citywide community organizing and slum profiling and mapping support robust participatory planning forums that have shaped city policy and practice and catalysed the implementation of a range of slum upgrading projects. Learning exchanges to and from Kampala have focused on topics ranging from innovative sanitation technology to construction methods to the development of land-sharing models for inner city land-based finance to large-scale mixed-use development, incorporating both low-cost housing and informal market upgrades to the development of the SDI network’s first youth media team to citywide profiling and mapping of Kampala’s slums. This learning has resulted in the implementation of a number innovative projects within Kampala as well as across the SDI network where federations have learned from the Kampala federation. As a result of this work, an MOU was signed between the federation and the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) establishing an Advisory Committee for Urban Renewal, chaired by the KCCA Executive Director.

In the Cape Town learning center, the federation (FEDUP) and Informal Settlement Network (ISN) have also undertaken profiling, enumeration and mapping at city scale. Enumeration of 18,000 structures and profiling of 106 settlements was undertaken as part of two government tenders, representing both a massive achievement in terms of recognition of the quality of community-collected data on informal settlements, and a distinct challenge in terms of creating a service-provider/client relationship between organized communities of the urban poor and government.

SDI identified Cape Town as a learning center in order to ensure representation of middle income countries with well-resourced cities and highly regularized planning frameworks. Federations in such cities can struggle to be viewed as partners in development and parties to decision-making. A related paradox is that successful community precedents are taken up by the government and replicated, but when replicated the central success element of community participation gets lost (eg. Peoples Housing Process (PHP) and re-blocking).

Some important learning opportunities in Cape Town from the 2013 – 2017 period include the re-blocking of informal settlements to improve accessibility, reduce risk of shack fires, flooding, and crime, and allow for basic service extension; community-led research and enterprise development into clean cooking technologies; open space upgrading to include a drainage system, community halls, children’s playground, and sanitation facilities; a community-driven finance facility that manages contributions from government and donor partners towards slum upgrading projects; and the establishment of a Solid Waste Network with over 350 informal waste pickers.

In the Accra learning center, the federation’s participation in the Cities Alliance-funded Land, Services, and Citizenship Program dramatically increased the scale and impact of its work and made it an important learning center in SDI’s West Africa region. As part of the program, the Ghana federation, GHAFUP, was the lead community partner charged with mobilizing savings schemes at city scale, profiling, enumerating, and mapping Accra’s settlements, establishing settlement forums, organizing communities to participate in city forums, contributing to the drafting of national urban policies, and designing and implementing community slum upgrading projects such as sanitation units, water taps, and footpaths. Exchanges to and from this learning center served to introduce lessons from the Uganda Country Program (TSUPU), and spread these throughout Ghana and into Liberia, to which Cities Alliance introduced a Country Program most recently. Of late, the Accra learning center has been at the forefront of engagements seeking to understand what resilience and climate change adaptation should look like in cities characterized by informality – engaging in rich reflections with government partners on their city-wide profiling data.

Additional important learning opportunities supported by Accra from 2013-2018 include citywide slum profiling and mapping – including serving mapping –  making the Ghana SDI alliance a nationally recognised source for slum data and knowledge; the development of an active youth component engaged in data collection, media production, toilet construction, and solar energy, and waste management; precedent setting solar energy and clean cooking projects; and strong contribution to the National Urban Policy Framework and Action Plan.

The Mumbai learning center is unique in its offering for knowledge applicable to working at a massive scale. Mega cities throughout the network look to Mumbai for lessons on how to meet some of the most obstinate issues facing millions of slum dwellers – namely climate change, mega infrastructural investments and their impact on the poor, entrenched inequality and intergenerational exclusion. Highly productive exchanges to and from the Mumbai learning center have resulted in stronger partnerships between federations and city governments and more ambitious aspirations for slum upgrading by these partners, especially in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa.

Some important learning opportunities supported by Mumbai from 2013-2018 include digitizing of savings records to increase accountability and transparency; incorporation of a vulnerability index into KYC settlement profiles; explorations around the use of solar power to subsidize the cost of maintenance at housing relocation sites; in influencing private sector investment protocols to assess impact on the city’s poorest and most vulnerable.

SDI’s Basket Fund represents a commitment from SDI’s partners to join a global network of slum dweller organizations in their long-term struggle to combat poverty and exclusion in cities. In a development sector dominated by consultants and specialists, SDI adds value as a unique organization channeling resources directly to the poor for the development and implementation of their own strategies for change. This arrangement represents an understanding by SDI’s partners that systemic change won’t be projectized or fall neatly into a funding cycle, but requires long-term multi-pronged collaboration to continuously garrison the gains and push the boundaries.

On both fronts SDI made substantial inroads during the 2013-2017 period. Download the full publication here.

Learning & Growing from Strength to Strength: SDI Basket Fund Close-out Report 2013-2017

“Today if you are hungry and have nothing, you become a subject for discussion and a resource for those who would then spend the first five years discussing and strategizing how to desist you from your poverty. There will be workshops, seminars and conferences to discuss how to give you a meal.”

– Patrick Hunsley, founding president of the South African Federation of the Urban Poor

The end of 2017 marked the end of a four-year strategic planning period for SDI and the close-out of various projects and contracts in support of implementation of that plan. To report on the successes, challenges, and impact of our work over that time, SDI produced a Basket Fund Close Out report, available in full here. In the upcoming series of blog posts, we will pull excerpts from this report that highlight some of the key learnings and impact of our work over the past four years and point towards areas for continued growth in the new Strategic Plan, launched this year.

SDI’s Basket Fund represents a commitment from SDI’s partners to join a global network of slum dweller organizations in their long-term struggle to combat poverty and exclusion in cities. In a development sector dominated by consultants and specialists, SDI adds value as a unique organization channeling resources directly to the poor for the development and implementation of their own strategies for change. This arrangement represents an understanding by SDI’s partners that systemic change won’t be projectized or fall neatly into a funding cycle, but requires long-term multi-pronged collaboration to continuously garrison the gains and push the boundaries.

On both fronts SDI made substantial inroads during the 2013-2017 period.

SDI aimed to strengthen the ability of our communities to apply their learning tools with more rigor. 

The first objective of the SDI Strategic Plan 2013-2017 was for federations to apply tools for learning with greater rigor. Through concentrated investment in peer-to-peer learning between federations community networks have: enhanced their understanding of and engagement with the global resilience agenda; undertaken transnational eviction prevention and response action; and taken the quality and impact of profiling and enumeration data to new heights. New learning centers have been established for action-based learning at innovative project pilots that utilize this learning in innovative and scalable ways. Peer-to-peer learning, monitoring, and evaluation systems have been socialized throughout the network, resulting in a wealth of data that is digestible for national and international audiences opening up opportunities for new partners and resources. Critically, these capacities are equally effectively serving local and regional strategy-setting and accountability by federations.

SDI aimed to get governments to prioritize incremental, in situ upgrading and energy justice. 

The second objective of the SDI Strategic Plan 2013-2017 was for incremental, in situ, affordable upgrading to be prioritized by city governments. Here we see concrete and directly attributable improvements to the built environment and people’s living conditions through upgrading projects. The increasing size and complexity of SDI’s upgrading projects is documented, as is the larger share of the project portfolio held by energy projects. The report notes the implications regarding demands for more refined professional inputs and also the longer project planning and implementation periods associated with both area-wide and innovative projects. City officials are increasingly incorporated in city-to-city learning exchanges on such projects, generating partnership agreements between federations and officials in many cities. Documentation of such learning is robust and digitized and thus feeds not only exchange participants, but also the network more broadly. Project-linked data show the change to peoples’ lives in terms of increased access to secure tenure and basic services.

In the 2013-2017 period, SDI placed considerable efforts on the identification of emerging good upgrading practice in respect of clean energy for slums. These efforts have been carried out alongside continuing efforts to identify and expose communities to good practices in sanitation, informal market upgrading, and housing. At the outset of the project SDI intended to “develop the supply chain, the internal infrastructure and the capacity to be able to deliver at scale” and estimated this would “take the first 4 to 6 months”. The reality of course was that this process took considerably longer and the trajectory looked very different in each affiliate.

Impressive demand generation for clean energy in urban poor communities, technical capacity for clean energy technology in federations and support NGOs, and innovative business modelling has taken place in 10 affiliates and often multiple cities/towns within those affiliates. Affiliates have needed to engage new partners, new suppliers, and new policy spaces. All involved have been on a steep learning curve. While a “starter pack” approach for household systems was identified as a priority solution at the outset of the project, the network has identified more complex and innovative approaches as the network’s exploration and research (from settlement to global level) has progressed. These approaches will allow greater influence on outcome level priorities for shifting policy and practice in terms of serving the poorest, integrating solar into the wider energy system, and moving from household level to settlement and city-wide impact. As predicted at the outset, there has proved to be a dearth of local maintenance and installation capacity in low income areas and the network has taken impressive strides to demonstrate SDI’s value add in this respect – training local communities to install and distribute clean technologies, to undertake research into the energy demands of slum communities and to map appropriate technologies, to maintain and repair solar home and public lighting systems, and to manage energy service hubs for awareness generation and behavioral change initiatives.

SDI aimed to make sure slum dwellers voices are sought in the international advocacy space. 

The third objective of the SDI Strategic Plan 2013-2017 was for the international advocacy space to focus on people-centered upgrading. SDI reached all programme targets related to advocacy and the impact of this work on the New Urban Agenda and SDGs is easily recognized. The challenge facing the network is to ensure these new policy opportunities translate into concrete implementation strategies and increased finance flows to inclusive upgrading of informal settlements. The previous strategic planning period saw considerable transnational collaboration between SDI and other popular movements and joint efforts to influence implementation plans and resource flows. Finally, a key success for advocacy was the increasing role of community-produced content for advocacy, learning, and knowledge spearheaded by SDI’s Know Your City TV initiative.

SDI aimed to increase organizational sustainability and decrease reliance on donor funding

The fourth objective of the SDI Strategic Plan 2013-2017 spoke to the long-term sustainability of the SDI network. SDI has worked to diversify income streams and reduce reliance on unpredictable and increasingly projectized donor support. SDI reduced its donor dependency from 100% to 90% during the past 4 years. A new Urban Poverty Fighter campaign has been launched and aims to generate new revenues from the European, African, and later US public. SDI’s Trust Fund is growing slowly, but steadily, and is making incrementally greater annual contributions to SDI’s annual budget. With support from the Trust, SDI has purchased a building in Woodstock, Cape Town to serve as the offices of the Secretariat, a KYC Youth Resource Center, and generate revenue through commercial rentals. These organizational sustainability efforts are complemented by investment in building second-tier leadership and a larger youth membership. These latter efforts are more straightforward than the finance-diversification ambitions and SDI is consistently exceeding set targets.

SDI invested almost a year in the development of its Strategic Plan for the period 2018-2022 and will continue a Basket Fund arrangement with its partners to support a programme called: Investing in local knowledge, action and learning for inclusive urban transformation: Slum dwellers on the frontlines of global struggles against poverty, exclusion, and climate change. In this next phase of collaboration SDI will again challenge itself to reach new heights and build upon the solid foundation created during the past 5 years.

SDI prides itself on making investments in poor people’s efforts to set and drive their own development agenda and to govern their own organizations. SDI sincerely thanks its Basket Fund partners for their commitment to this approach.